90% Open Source Lightning

Well, not exactly: Lightning, which comes from Mozilla, is a 100% open source calendar extension for Mozilla Thunderbird....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Stop Software Patents Today - and Every Day

Today is World Day against Software Patents, apparently:

Three years ago the European Parliament stopped the attempt to make software patents enforcable in Europe. An unprecedented community effort made it possible with a relative low awareness about the dangers among larger software companies. Since then litigation and patent traps have become a serious problem for the market and users of software. We need to reduce patent risks which impede innovation and investment.

On a worldwide scale Patent Offices continue to grant these rights and did not adapt their practice. They are facing a patent crisis caused by lowering standards and fail to cope with their examination backlog. In a patent office the main creativity shown is directed towards interpretation of their own legal base. Even without political support the patent community expands what can be made patentable through practice and case law. Though they face a groundswell of interest in stopping software patents their typical excuse is: "We don't grant software patents, we don't really know what software patents are." or "Why exclude software?" or "We just execute the law.". Additionally they lobby the legislator. It is upon democratic forces to bring bureaucracies back under control which live well off with their software patent regimes. It is indispensible that the software community remains organised and responsive.

We want to overcome the software patent crisis. We raise awareness about their devastating effects on the emerging information and knowlege society where software predominates and we make our constructive reform proposals heard. But without your support there would be no way to succeed. Rather the ongoing threads would aggravate.

Of course, *every* day should be a Stop Software Patents Day....

Could it Get Even BECTA?

News that an open source company has become an accredited IT services supplier for schools and colleges across the UK broke on Monday. As has been widely noted, this is an important step forward for free software, albeit a rather belated one....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Microsoft's Black Humour

Just yesterday, Microsoft Malaysia posted a new advertisement in a Malaysian daily which gloated that it now had control of all the software pirates in Malaysia. This new "feature" targets pirates by making the background of the desktops black, making it easy for law enforcers to fine the law breakers.

As this post points out, animadverting to screens of death is not a very clever move.

Proof That Authoritarianism Leads to Insanity

A government minister has spoken glowingly of the prospect of kids as young as six handing over their biometrics as she boasted that the Tories and LibDems would find it impossible to unpick the government’s ID card scheme.

Barking, totally barking.

Clever Old Cleversafe

I have been a bit remiss in not mentioning Cleversafe before. It's a company with a very, er, clever idea, which has been open source from the start. It's just released a new version of its free code, and this gives me a good opportunity to to make up for past sins of omission....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Who Needs Wikipedia...?

...when you've got Deletionpedia:

Deletionpedia is an archive of about 63,552 pages which have been deleted from the English-language Wikipedia.

Deletionpedia is not a wiki: you cannot edit the pages uploaded here. An automated bot uploads pages as they are deleted from Wikipedia.

Couldn't we make that a round 65,536 (another pedant asks)? (Via the Next Web.)

How Not to Fly the Flag...

Flying the flag for "UK digital firms" is a nice idea; pity they got the Union Jack back to front (a pedant writes...)

IBM Fires a Shot Across the ISO's Bows

I've written before about the parlous state into which the once-irreproachable ISO has fallen, particularly with its flagrant disregard of the concerns of major developing countries like India and Brazil during the OOXML standardisation process. Pointing out the ISO's flaws is easy enough, but fixing them is more problematic. It seemed likely that much of the impetus would come from those countries that have been marginalised by the ISO, but things have just got much more interesting with the announcement of IBM's new “IT Standards Policy” which addresses precisely these issues....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Urgent: Telecoms Package Vote *Again*

Back in July I urged you to write to your MEPs about the Telecoms Package. Well, I'm at it again: the main vote was postponed, and will now take place on Wednesday 24 September, so there’s still time to write to your MEPs and ask them to support some amendments that should help (more details from Open Rights Group.)

On Open Enterprise blog.

Of Digital Abundance and Analogue Scarcity

Recently, I’ve started buying records. I’ve decided that CDs just aren’t enough of a collector’s item. Since I can own all the music I could ever want digitally, I want to buy something that looks nice, special, and something that’s going to be fun to browse through in a couple of years. Records are beautiful collector’s items, CDs don’t even come close; especially because records are almost always available in special limited editions with coloured vinyl, posters, extra sleeves and whatnot. I also prefer the warm, soothing sound of records compared to the sound you get from CDs and especially MP3s, which - contrary to what some may believe - do not have nearly the same sound quality as CDs or records.

This is one way for the music industry to make money: sell *records* again....

UK Gov Short of Cash? Kill the ID Card

At a time when Labour is pledging "no tax increases", and yet is facing a bigger and bigger deficit, one easy part of the answer is clear: scrap ID cards now, and save yourself £19 billion you haven't got.

Word of the Day: Gagauzia

Never 'eard of it. You live and learn....

Peer-Reviewed Open Journal of Science Online

One of the most eloquent proponents of the idea of open science is Cameron Neylon. Here's an interesting post about bringing peer review to online material:

many of the seminal works for the Open Science community are not peer reviewed papers. Bill Hooker’s three parter [1, 2, 3] at Three Quarks Daily comes to mind, as does Jean-Claude’s presentation on Nature Precedings on Open Notebook Science, Michael Nielsen’s essay The Future of Science, and Shirley Wu’s Envisioning the scientific community as One Big Lab (along with many others). It seems to me that these ought to have the status of peer reviewed papers which raises the question. We are a community of peers, we can referee, we can adopt some sort of standard of signficance and decide to apply that selectively to specific works online. So why can’t we make them peer reviewed?

Two Views of Enterprise Open Source

You can tell business is a bit quiet in the open source world, because it seems that everybody wants to talk to me at the moment – clearly they have nothing better to do. As I described, I met up with JasperSoft last week, and then the next day had a chat with not one but two companies whose views and comments offered contrasting viewpoints on enterprise open source....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Cisco Reduces Messaging to Just Jabber

Cisco today announced its intent to acquire privately held Jabber, Inc., a provider of presence and messaging software. Based in Denver, Jabber will work with Cisco to enhance the existing presence and messaging functions of Cisco's Collaboration portfolio.

As several have pointed out, open source doesn't really enter into the equation - or even get a mention in the press release. That's not surprising: Cisco neither gets nor cares about free software. For Cisco, this is just some pretty icing, which it will doubtless distribute freely. Everyone else can now forget about making money in messaging.

Open Access Books from Bloomsbury Academic

Here's a fine open access initiative, but unusually, it's for books:

Bloomsbury Academic is a radically new scholarly imprint launched in September 2008.

Bloomsbury Academic will begin publishing monographs in the areas of Humanities and Social Sciences. While respecting the traditional disciplines we will seek to build innovative lists on a thematic basis, on issues of particular relevance to the world today.

Publications will be available on the Web free of charge and will carry Creative Commons licences. Simultaneously physical books will be produced and sold around the world.

For the first time a major publishing company is opening up an entirely new imprint to be accessed easily and freely on the Internet. Supporting scholarly communications in this way our authors will be better served in the digital age.

Let's hope it, er, blooms.

Open Source Giraffe

One of the biggest votes of confidence in open source can be found in the number of previously closed-source companies adopting it as part of their strategy. Here's another....

On Open Enterprise blog.

The *Other* Vista: Successful and Open Source

The is a clear pattern to open source's continuing rise. The first free software that was deployed was at the bottom of the enterprise software stack: GNU/Linux, Apache, Sendmail, BIND. Later, databases and middleware layers were added in the form of popular programs like MySQL and Jboss. More recently, there have been an increasing number of applications serving the top of the software stack, addressing sectors like enterprise content management, customer relationship management, business intelligence and, most recently, data warehousing.

But all of these are generic programs, applicable to any industry: the next frontier for free software will be vertical applications serving particular sectors. In fact, we already have one success in this area, but few people know about it outside the industry it serves. Recent events mean that may be about to change....

On Linux Journal.

Avast There, Me Google Hearties

Google may be evil, but at least it has a sense of humour:

It recently came to our attention that Google was not accessible to a large, influential, and notoriously quick-tempered community: Pirates. As of today we are proud and rather relieved to announce that Google Search is available in Pirate.

That's Pirate the *language*....

Toshiba Who?

There is a deep irony in this:

Most netbook enthusiasts could recite the specs sight unseen, based on the most popular spec of the 9 inch netbook market. The powerplant is Intel’s 1.6GHz Atom N270, with 512MB of RAM in the Linux model (running Ubuntu 8.04 with OpenOffice 2.4) and 1GB in the Windows XP version, and a hard drive up to 120GB. Then there’s a LAN socket, 802.11g Wi-Fi, three USB ports (which can charge connected devices such as an iPod even while the netbook is asleep), a low-res (0.3 megapixel) webcam and memory card reader.…… sorry, did we nod off at the keyboard for a moment there?

Quite. Once Toshiba was the Microsoft of portable computing, but it's belated and boring entry into the ultraportable market confirms that - like Microsoft - Toshiba is a follower, not a leader.

St. Bruce Nails it Again

airport security has to make a choice. If something is dangerous, treat it as dangerous and treat anyone who tries to bring it on as potentially dangerous. If it's not dangerous, then stop trying to keep it off airplanes. Trying to have it both ways just distracts the screeners from actually making us safer.

Read the whole thing - it says it all.

Is Sir Tim B-L Distancing Himself from the W3C?

When you've invented probably the most important technology for fifty years – and then magnanimously given it away – it's hardly surprising if your every move is seized upon. And yet in the case of Sir Tim Berners-Lee's latest wheeze, I've been struck by the paucity of real analysis. Most commentators have been happy to applaud its obviously laudable intentions. But I wonder whether there might be more to the move than meets the eye....

On Open Enterprise blog.

Enterprise Open Source 2.0

Yesterday I met up with Brian Gentile, the CEO of JasperSoft. He's relatively new to the job, although not new to the company, since he was already on its board for some time. It was striking that much of our conversation was about marketing and management, and that's probably a fair reflection of why Gentile's there: he's been brought in essentially to take that little old open source startup to the next level – and that means worrying about all that tiresome adult stuff like articulating corporate strategies, conversion rates, and generally getting a good operational handle on things....

On Open Enterprise blog.

A Breath of Fresh Air

A major breathalyzer vendor is facing increasing pressure to make the source code of its product available for inspection by defendants. I’m pleased to see my home state of Minnesota leading the charge. The Constitution gives you the right to confront your accuser, and if your accuser is 50,000 lines of assembly code, then you have a right to examine that code. And if CMI doesn’t want to release the source code for its products, then it shouldn’t have gone into a business in which its product is the key witness against defendants in criminal cases.

Quite.